As was the case with gains being made in digital printing in other segments, faster equipment and better quality lead to longer runs being produced, and the point where print runs for digital printing became cost effective compared to conventional printing increase. Leading digital textile ink manufacturers are seeing similar trends in their business.

“Today’s digital printers, like the Epson SureColor F9200 dye-sublimation printer, have a Price-to-Performance ratio significantly better than prior generation products,” Check reported. “In addition, improvements in ink efficiencies allow less ink to be used, which is helping to lower the production cost.”

“In the last five years, digital printing is as cost effective or more cost effective in specific cases,” said Jim Lambert, VP, GM - Digital Division, of INX International Ink Co.

Tommy Martin, product manager, Textiles & Apparel Business Development for Mimaki USA, observed that as the equipment gets better, it also becomes more efficient, faster, less costly and more diverse.

“Within the textile embellishment industry, there is a range from small desktop printers all the way up to 5-meter wide machines that are capable of printing on any type of fabric, based on available ink type, for just about any purpose,” Martin added. “When speaking of the roll-to-roll conventional printing vs. digital printing, it is getting more competitive for those businesses. The conventional printers are finding they’re producing smaller runs with more colors, which means they will endure more downtime for set-up and breakdown. This is a very inefficient process.”

“Indeed, we start to see business models based on fully digital factories claiming that it will be more economical than a traditional mill,” Dr. Christophe Bulliard, marketing director, Sensient Imaging Technologies SA, said. “This is still in development, but it raises further the interest for high performance inkjet inks.”

Jos Notermans, commercial manager digital textiles at SPGPrints, said that with textiles, inkjet printing is a productive solution for long runs as well as short: adding that users of SPGPrints’ PIKE printer for example have reported being able to supply 50,000 linear meter orders within two days.

“But run length size alone is not the only consideration,” Notermans added. “The decision to choose digital may depend on the color required - the latest digital inks combined with the control of, for example, Archer technology, enable a much wider color gamut than is possible with conventional printing, enabling deep and rich colors. Furthermore, digital printing allows unlimited number of colors. With rotary printing, economics limits the number of colors in a production run, as setup times and consumable costs escalate with every screen used.”

Ultimately, Epson America’s Check said that the digital has overtaken analog printing for textiles.

“The speed and production cost improvements moved the trade-off point between digital inkjet vs traditional analog production so that digital is more cost effective for larger job sizes,” Check concluded.